28 The New York Review
Casting Pearls Before Repetilovs
Gary Saul Morson
Woe from Wit:
A Verse Comedy in Four Acts
by Alexander Griboedov, translated
from the Russian by Betsy Hulick.
Columbia University Press,
152 pp., $30.00; $14.95 (paper)
The Death of the Vazir- Mukhtar
by Yuri Tynianov, translated
from the Russian by Susan Causey
and edited by Vera Tsareva- Brauner.
London: Look MultiMedia,
420 pp., $25.00 (paper)
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar
by Yury Tynyanov,
translated from the Russian by Anna
Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush.
Columbia University Press,
599 pp., $40.00; $19.95
(paper; to be published in April)
When Alexander Pushkin read the
manuscript of Alexander Griboedov’s
verse comedy Woe from Wit, he real-
ized at once that it would be a major
Russian classic and that many of its
lines would become proverbs. He was
right: scholars have calculated that
Russians quote this work more than
any other. People repeat its lines with
no awareness that they have an au-
thor. As English speakers say “To err
is human” without thinking of Pope’s
Essay on Criticism, so Russians say
“No one happy minds the clock” with-
out considering, or expecting others
to consider, its context in Griboedov’s
masterpiece.
Completed in 1824, shortly before a
group of Russian officers (now called
the Decembrists) attempted their
abortive revolt of December 14, 1825,
the provocative play could not be pub-
lished, let alone staged, in Griboedov’s
lifetime. No matter: readers resorted to
a practice that, in Soviet times, would
be called samizdat (self- publishing)
and copied the work by hand. As many
as 40,000 copies were in circulation
by 1830, and the work was known and
quoted even in distant provinces. When
Griboedov’s close friend, the reaction-
ary Faddei Bulgarin—a writer and
publisher who was also an informer
for the tsar’s secret police—managed
to publish an excerpt of the play, it be-
came possible to discuss it openly long
before the full text appeared in the
1860s. Since then it has been the most
widely performed play in the Russian
repertoire.
Both Woe from Wit and its author
have fascinated critics and ordinary
readers. Griboedov’s contemporaries
found his personality irresistible. “His
melancholy character, his caustic wit,
his good nature, his very weaknesses
and vices... everything in him was
unusually appealing,” wrote Pushkin.
An expert pianist, a composer who
impressed Mikhail Glinka, and a pro-
digious scholar, Griboedov was consid-
ered exceptional even when he had only
written minor dramas and vaudevilles.
He entered Moscow University at the
astonishingly precocious age of eleven,
finished his degree in literature in two
years, then promptly entered the fac-
ulty of law, from which he graduated at
age fifteen. His plan to get yet another
degree, in science and mathematics,
was derailed by Napoleon’s invasion
of Russia in 1812. Griboedov enlisted
but never saw combat. By this time he
could read Latin and Greek and was
fluent in French, German, Italian, and
English. He later learned Arabic and
Persian, which helped him advance in
the diplomatic service.
Though socially well connected, his
family had little money, and Griboe-
dov, to the dismay of many, paid close
attention to his career, even though, in
Woe from Wit, he satirized the cynical
careerism of the play’s repulsive char-
acter Molchalin—so repulsive that
he seduces his boss’s daughter so she
can lobby on his behalf. Griboedov’s
diplomatic service took him to Per-
sia, where, after marrying a Georgian
princess, he was brutally killed in an
upr isi ng i n Teh ra n i n 18 29. He wa s on ly
thirty- four, and had written no major
work besides Woe from Wit, without
which he would hardly be remem-
bered today. Yuri Tynyanov, an early-
twentieth- century critic and novelist,
wrote of Griboedov’s gruesome de-
mise in The Death of Vazir- Mukhtar,
bringing events from Griboedov’s life
together with scenes and well- known
quotations from his play. “Who’s the
Molchalin here?” Tynyanov asked.
“Well, that’s clear, that’s easy: Mol-
chalin was him.”The plot of Woe from Wit is simple. It
opens with the heroine, Sophie, and her
maid, Liza, warding off Sophie’s father,
Famusov, so he does not discover that
she has spent the night with Molchalin,who is Famusov’s secretary. Chatsky, a
landowner and the play’s hero, arrives
after three years abroad and, remark-
ably enough, expects that Sophie will
still love him even though he sent no
messages while he was away. As the
play progresses, it presents a series of
characters to whom Chatsky makes
lengthy, high- minded speeches about
complete truthfulness, independent
thought, and the dishonesty of seek-
ing influence or following fashions, es-
pecially those from abroad. Famusov
deems these sentiments dangerous
(“He’s a Carbonari!”), while others
find them incomprehensible.
Sophie is in love with Molchalin, but
Chatsky cannot believe that she cares
for such a man. In fact, no evidence,
from her frequent rebuffs to her sharp
criticisms of his bilious character,
seems sufficient for Chatsky to grasp
that she no longer loves him:Sophie:
Let me ask you:
Has it ever happened that,
laughing or sad
Or by mistake you’ve said
something good about someone?
If not now, then perhaps in
childhood?Chatsky:
Command: I’d go through fire on
the spot.Sophie:
Fine if you burn, but what if you
do not?Elsewhere, she says:Your murderous cold’s too much
for me
Either to hear you or to see.When Sophie praises Molchalin,
Chatsky thinks she cannot mean it. As
the third act begins, he still remains in
doubt: “I’ll wait for her and make her
confess/Who’s dear to her, Molchalin
or Skalozub”—a general and her fa-
ther’s preferred suitor.
In act 3 the Famusovs give a ball,
allowing Griboedov to introduce a
menagerie of satiric types: a domi-
neering wife with her emasculated
husband ; P r ince Tugo - U khovsky (Hard-
of- Hearing), who never says an intel-
ligible word; a spiteful countess ac-
companied by her granddaughter; and
a swindling go- between whom every-
one despises but is glad to make use
of. As the henpecked husband Platon
Mikhailovich explains, “With us a
man whom all detest/Is everywhere a
welcome guest.”
Irritated by Chatsky’s constant sar-
casm, Sophie starts the rumor that he is
insane. The first person she tells doesn’t
believe it but immediately repeats the
line, and within minutes everyone ac-
cepts the spurious diagnosis as fact be-
cause everyone else does. (The name
Chatsky is often thought to allude to
Pyotr Chaadaev, a well- known skep-
tic who later published a famous essay
denouncing Russian culture as utterly
worthless. In response the tsar, as if
recalling Griboedov’s play, had Chaa-
daev locked up in a madhouse—an in-
cident many recalled when the Soviets
diagnosed dissidents as suffering from
“sluggish schizophrenia.”)
Act 3 ends when Chatsky, who has
been delivering a lengthy tirade about
the craze for French fashion, at last
looks around to find that everyone
has disappeared. In Chekhov’s plays,
people talk but do not listen to one
another, a failure of empathy that is
one of his most important themes, but
both theme and technique are already
present in Griboedov’s play. Tugo-
Ukhovsky cannot hear and Chatsky
refuses to listen. As Pushkin observed,
Chatsky pays no attention to his audi-
ence. “Who is the [only] intelligent per-
son in the comedy?” Pushkin asked.
“Griboedov”:Chatsky... spent some time with
a very intelligent man (namely,
with Griboedov) and absorbed
his thoughts, witticisms and satir-
ical remarks. Everything he says is
very clever. But to whom does he
say it all? To Famusov? To Skalo-
zub?... This is unforgivable. The
first sign of an intelligent person is
to know from the first glance with
whom you are dealing and not to
cast pearls before the Repetilovs
and their ilk.Pushkin attributed the hero’s ludicrous
pearl casting to a flaw in the play’s con-
ception, but Chatsky’s failure to imag-
ine the perspective of others, or even
notice their absence, constitutes an es-
sential feature of his character. He, too,
is a satiric type: the oblivious idealist
deaf to the concerns of others.Alexander Griboedov; portrait by Ivan Kramskoi, 1873Alamy